"The Family That Preys" is a movie in which everybody is mean, stupid or a combination of the two.

Consider Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), who shamelessly cheats on her doormat of a husband, Chris (Rockmond Dunbar). That's mean. The affair is with her boss, William (Cole Hauser), who gives her lavish bonuses she sticks into a bank account Chris can access easily. That's stupid.

Then there's William's mother, Charlotte (Kathy Bates), who inexplicably hates her saintly daughter-in-law, Jillian (KaDee Strickland). That's mean. However, Charlotte allows her snake of a son to sell off her controlling share in the family company when promised he won't try anything funny. That's stupid.

The latest film off the Tyler Perry assembly line is a laughable foray into high melodrama that becomes camp so quickly it's hard to imagine anyone involved not knowing the material was garbage.

It all begins with Andrea's and Chris' wedding. They are black, and it's paid for by Charlotte, a lifelong white friend of Andrea's mother, Alice (Alfre Woodard). The potential for racial politics is practically skywritten here, but Perry never really makes use of the set-up.

Instead, the story awkwardly jumps four years into the future, where William and Charlotte fight for control of their company, which makes tall buildings or something. The Freudian aspects of their relationship are a scream. Take a drink every time William says "mother" in a comically overwrought tone reminiscent of Christian Bale's Batman.

Meanwhile, Andrea's and Chris' marriage is on the skids, mainly because she's a high-powered accountant, or whatever, at the William-Charlotte company, and he's a construction worker.

Also, she's abusive, cheats on him and is hiding a ton of money. When Chris discovers Andrea is secretly loaded, his first impulse is to ask her for cash to start his own construction company, rather than, I don't know, divorcing the pants off her. Stupid.

In the midst of all this, Charlotte and Alice take a road trip. They visit a country/western bar, they get baptized, they go to a strip club. It's unclear what any of this has to do with anything.

While they're gone, all the morons back home say and do hurtful things to each other while orchestrated music heaves in the background. Disappointingly, though, nobody gets a drink thrown in their face. And it all climaxes in, yep, a board meeting, which falls slightly ahead of courtroom scenes for the dullest possible way to climax a movie.

Don't let these explanations fool you into thinking there's any complexity in this film, which is essentially a daytime soap stretched painfully to feature length. Everything about "The Family That Preys" -- the story, the dialogue and most certainly the acting -- needed more time in the oven.

All indications are that the ever-prolific Perry, like the story, is spread far too thin.